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New ways to spend money

June 17th, 2017 · Posted by Skuds in Life/Technology · No Comments · Life, Technology

It seems like each new advance in technology just gives you more opportunities to spend money buying stuff you already have. The advent of CD led a lot of people to buy new copies of LPs they had on vinyl – a trend that is now getting reversed to an extent. The advent of DVD got us buying films we already had on tapes – a trend that is not likely to ever reverse because video tape is objectively worse in every way possible. Blu Ray didn’t get many people replacing DVDs but there must have been some.

I have even bought some e-books that I already have as paper copies, but only if they are on a really spcial cheap deal of the day or something.

All that is fine I suppose, although getting to be a bit moot given that we can choose to not own that stuff at all and just stream it on demand now. But it is down to choice. You can choose to keep the old hardware and media and not get sucked into buying replacements.

The exception is PC computer games. I tried to take a trip down memory lane today by installing Age of Empires II which I still have the CDs for. It just won’t work on Windows 10. Something to do with the Safedisc DRM that these old games use being removed because it was a security vulnerability. Sure I could keep an old Windows XP machine just for playing games, or I could set up virtual machines with old OSs on them but that is a lot of hassle.

If I really want to play AoE, and probably Rise of Nations, Caesar II, Zeus/Poseidon, I will have to buy them again through Steam. Or not try playing games that are nearly twenty years old I suppose.

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